For most of my Protestant years, we were members of various charismatic sects. In those sects, worship consisted of praying to God. There was some worship, often called "Praise and Worship" when it involved songs addressed to God; there was also the collection of prayer requests followed by a prayer to God mentioning those requests. In other words, for many Protestants, worship of God consists solely of prayer to God, which is why a Catholic's prayer to the saints is so often seen as idolatry or somesuch.
Because of their vitiated notion of worship, many Protestants consider prayer to a saint to be worship of a saint.
Posted by billw at August 15, 2003 05:44 AMFrom "Difficulties of Anglicans" by Venerable John Henry Newman, C.O.
"Woe is me, if even by a breath I sully these ineffable truths! but still, without prejudice to them, there is, I say, another range of thought quite distinct from them, incommensurate with them, of which the Blessed Virgin is the centre. If we placed our Lord in that centre, we should only be dragging Him from His throne, and making Him an Arian kind of a God; that is, no God at all. He who charges us with making Mary a divinity, is thereby denying the divinity of Jesus. Such a man does not know what divinity is. Our Lord cannot pray for us, as a creature prays, as Mary prays; He cannot inspire those feelings which a creature inspires. To her belongs, as being a creature, a natural claim on our sympathy and familiarity, in that she is nothing else than our fellow. "
Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.
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